Contents

Background

According to Festus, a saloon owner one day decided to make a new type of soft drink. He asked his customers what flavor they would want it to be, but they were of no help. A Stranger at the end of the bar suggested him to make a sarsaparilla flavored drink, and would give his family's recipe to the saloon owner if he got to sample a bottle to make sure the recipe was being followed to the letter. The Saloon owner agreed, thinking it would make him rich. The Stranger then left to meet him the next day at sundown. The following day, the saloon owner was told by the sheriff that the Stranger was killed by bandits on the side of the town road. Cursing his luck, the saloon owner closed his store early, just as the sun began to set. After he locked the doors, he found a bottle with a note under it sealed with blue wax in the shape of a star. Opening it, he found out that it was a recipe of a sarsaparilla-flavored drink. After sampling the contents of the bottle, and finding it singularly delicious, he began selling Sunset Sarsaparilla. However, this is likely to be largely a promotional story which may only have a hint of truth in it. The drink is, apparently, 126 years older than Nuka-Cola.

Characteristics

Sunset Sarsaparilla is a root-beer-type carbonated beverage found around New Vegas. With its easy availability and low cost, it is an excellent consumable that provides a high health regeneration effect. Thanks to these factors, it supplements the somewhat-scarce stimpak as a primary healing item in the Mojave. Company spokesbot Festus provides a comical list of potential side effects, but only while playing in Hardcore mode does drinking Sunset Sarsaparilla have the negative effect of mildly dehydrating the Courier.

The company's "Silly Ol' Advisory" names these possible side effects: "Kidney damage, nausea, digital numbness, anxiety, loss of visual acuity, dizziness, occasional nosebleeds, joint inflammation, tooth decay, sore throat, bronchitis, organ rupture and halitosis.". In order for those effects to happen, Festus says you must drink "a helluva lot", however, you can have as many drinks as you want, and not suffer from those side effects in-game.

Strangely enough, when you drink a Sunset Sarsaparilla, you get bottle caps. The bottle caps are (when looking at the icon on the Pip-Boy) Nuka-Cola caps.

The story Festus tells you about the origins of Sunset Sarsaparilla does not fit with the information he gives you. He tells you that before Sunset Sarsaparilla was invented, the main choices people had for drinking were water or Nuka-Cola. Nuka-Cola was founded in the year 2044, but according to the large bottle at the entrance of the Sunset Sarsaparilla Headquarters, Sunset Sarsaparilla was founded in 1918, over 125 years before Nuka-Cola was. This may be due to the fact that Sunset Sarsaparilla was a family recipe before a corporately sold beverage, and was first made by the Stranger's family in 1918.

Apparently Canadians like Sunset Sarsaparilla about just as much as Americans do, judging by the sales.

As with Nuka-Cola, you do not keep the empty bottle after drinking it.

If you pick it up, you will automatically drop it if it hits another object that can be picked up.

The total age of the drink is 363 years old from the date 2281.

Behind the scenes

Sarsaparilla is a type of bitter root found in Central America which was originally used for medicinal purposes; owing to the root's bitterness, it was combined with sweetened water to make dosing more palatable. In America, the bark and oil of the sassafras tree was added to the formula; this "root beer" eventually became a popular drink in the late-19th-century Old West. The similarity of the two roots' names led to the informal nickname of "Sasparilly."